Usually it is a car wreck. But there are also wounds from gunshots, plane crashes and falls from horses, bicycles and scaffolding. Everybody's story is a little different. Kristi Reid recalls nearly every detail of those first few hours, including the name of her emergency room nurse. Sam Barukh did not even know for a month that he was paralyzed. What they and others in recovery share in common is the lifelong effect of a spinal cord injury.

A small number of children in California have come down with polio-like illnesses since 2012 -- suffering paralysis in one or more limbs and other symptoms -- and physicians and public health officials do not yet know why. A virus may play a role, said Dr. Carol Glaser, leader of a California Department of Public Health team investigating the illnesses, which are occurring sporadically throughout the state. The afflicted kids suffer severe weakness or paralysis, which strikes rapidly -- sometimes after a mild respiratory illness. Scans of the patients' spinal cords show patterns of damage similar to that found in polio sufferers , Glaser said. Two of the affected children tested positive for enterovirus-68, a virus that is usually associated with respiratory illness but which has been linked to polio-like illnesses as well.

Saudi Arabia denied reports that a young man had been sentenced to paralysis, a punishment that human rights groups had excoriated as a form of torture. “This is untrue,” the Justice Ministry said Monday on its Twitter account, according to a translation by blogger Ahmed Omran . The judge “dismissed the request of such punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last month that if Ali Khawahir could not pay roughly $270,000 to the friend he allegedly stabbed and paralyzed a decade ago, he in turn would be paralyzed.

When Omar Naasir wants a restful night's sleep in Aleppo, he says, he stays as close as possible to the front line of the ongoing clashes between Syrian rebel and government forces. Farther back in his rebel-controlled neighborhood, Naasir says, the risk of death greatly increases because of the barrel bombs and other explosives raining down daily amid the government's bombardment campaign. "Between us and the regime army is sometimes less than 100 meters, so they don't drop barrel bombs there so they don't strike their positions," he said via Skype, referring to the deadly oil drums filled with TNT. "With barrel bombs, there is a feeling of paralysis that is indescribable," said the former peace activist turned rebel.

Alarmed by reports that Saudi Arabia will paralyze a man as punishment for allegedly stabbing a friend who ended up paralyzed, Britain urged the kingdom Thursday to abandon the “grotesque punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last week that Ali Khawahir was sentenced to be paralyzed if he could not pay 1 million riyals - roughly $270,000 - to the friend he allegedly stabbed a decade ago. Khawahir was reportedly 14 years old when he...

Michigan researchers have found the gene for a rare leg-weakening nerve disease, called hereditary spastic paraplegia, that slowly robs children of their ability to walk. As many as 20,000 Americans may suffer from the disease. The discovery should aid in diagnosis and possibly in the development of new treatments. There is no therapy now.

Scientists eased the paralysis of rats with spinal cord injuries by transplanting cells from adult mouse brains, an encouraging sign for developing human treatments, researchers reported. The paralyzed rats were given the mouse cells, called neural precursor cells, two or eight weeks after their injuries, according to the study in Wednesday's issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.

Hikers who carry around heavy, poorly adjusted backpacks that put pressure on their shoulders risk developing a temporary but "frightening," paralysis of their arms, a doctor warned last week. Dr. Patrick Rosario said he first noticed a syndrome he called "trekker's shoulder" when he was hiking through the Himalayas in Nepal and came across a young man who could not move his right arm after a day spent walking down steep trails.

A doctor at UCI Medical Center is using a drug made from one of nature's most powerful poisons to treat paralysis of the vocal cords, writer's cramp and other movement disorders. Dr. Daniel Truong, director of the hospital's new Parkinson and Movement Disorders Clinic, reported that his hospital was the first in Orange and Los Angeles counties to make the unusual treatment generally available.

Scientists said last week that they had succeeded in regenerating nerve fibers from the human central nervous system for the first time, a step that could eventually lead to restoring some function to paralyzed limbs. The University of Miami researchers cautioned in their paper in the journal Experimental Neurology that the work has been done only in the laboratory and that it will probably be five years before researchers attempt to restore movement to paralyzed muscles.

The nation's second-largest public school district is dealing with a few disciplinary problems of late, but it's not the students I'm talking about. It's the grown-ups. Members of the L.A. Unified administration think new school board President Richard Vladovic is a big bully, and in fact Vladovic has been under internal review for possible verbally abusive behavior. Supt. John Deasy had reportedly threatened to take his ball and leave the playground if Vladovic got the top job on the board but then changed his mind when it happened.

WASHINGTON - Even by the standards of a Congress that has earned a reputation for dysfunction, this past week - the last before a long summer recess - set a mark for futility. Republican leaders in the House had hoped to pass a bill providing money for several major government agencies. Instead, they halted the vote after a GOP campaign to reduce spending levels hit an unexpected roadblock: Rank-and-file Republicans refused to approve cuts in programs that home-state governors and mayors rely on to fix roads, streets and bridges.

You may have noticed that "Harry Potter" star Emma Watson has taken un-Hermione Granger-like roles as of late. That's after the 23-year-old stopped acting altogether for a bit and briefly enrolled at Brown University in 2009, then dropped out before completing a degree. Post-"Potter," the child star, who skyrocketed to fame in the big screen-adaptations of J.K. Rowling's series about a boy wizard, took on a small role in "My Week With Marilyn" in 2011, fully returned to acting in "The Perks of Being a Wallflower" and made serious fun of herself in the self-deprecating raunch-com "This Is the End. " But Watson said that she, and even her agent, were "surprised" by her return to acting after the juggernaut that was "Harry Potter" and the eight feature films.

Saudi Arabia denied reports that a young man had been sentenced to paralysis, a punishment that human rights groups had excoriated as a form of torture. “This is untrue,” the Justice Ministry said Monday on its Twitter account, according to a translation by blogger Ahmed Omran . The judge “dismissed the request of such punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last month that if Ali Khawahir could not pay roughly $270,000 to the friend he allegedly stabbed and paralyzed a decade ago, he in turn would be paralyzed.

Alarmed by reports that Saudi Arabia will paralyze a man as punishment for allegedly stabbing a friend who ended up paralyzed, Britain urged the kingdom Thursday to abandon the “grotesque punishment.” The Saudi Gazette reported last week that Ali Khawahir was sentenced to be paralyzed if he could not pay 1 million riyals - roughly $270,000 - to the friend he allegedly stabbed a decade ago. Khawahir was reportedly 14 years old when he...

ATHENS — Weeks of political paralysis look set to end in Greece with the election of parties that support the country's international bailout agreements, but the question now turns to whether a fragile new government can deal effectively with a tanking economy and popular unrest. The conservative New Democracy party eked out a slim victory in Sunday's parliamentary elections over Syriza, the radical-left group that vowed to ditch Athens' multibillion-dollar rescue deals and the harsh austerity measures they entailed.

Immediate treatment with high doses of a drug found in nerve cell membranes can dramatically limit the degree of paralysis in people who suffer from spinal cord injuries, a team of Maryland researchers reported. Their study, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, could help some of the 10,000 Americans who suffer spinal cord injuries each year. Most of the victims are men under 30 who are in automobile accidents.

A Mexican teen-ager shot near the Mexican border at Calexico last year by a U.S. Border Patrol agent faces the threat of paralysis because of bullet fragments lodged near his spinal cord, his San Diego attorney said. San Diego doctors are monitoring Eduardo Garcia Zamores, 15, to determine whether the bullet fragments are moving inside his body, said attorney Irwin M. Zalkin.

Reality TV producer Gay Rosenthal is behind such groundbreaking fare as TLC's "Little People, Big World" and Style's "Ruby. " In Sundance Channel's "Push Girls," Rosenthal explores the world of women living with paralysis - and suggests it is a reality alternative to HBO's 'Girls. " What is it like being Gay Rosenthal, reality TV producer? That's a hard question. Many times I say, if you had cameras on me, it would be a really fabulous sitcom. It's very busy. Today I started at 3:30 a.m. My days are pretty intense.

For those whose arms as well as legs are paralyzed by spinal cord injury, no skill is more broadly useful to regain than the ability to grasp and move objects. Researchers reporting in Nature magazine this week say they have devised a new way to get a patient's hand to grasp a greater range of objects: by playing recorded brain commands directly to muscle. For the paralyzed, the technique could provide brain signals a way around the broken spinal cord and allow hand movements more finely tuned to different tasks.